An Assessment of Fiscal Year 2013 Beyond Yellow Ribbon Programs

In 2011, Congress appropriated funding to expand the Yellow Ribbon Reintegration Program, authorizing "service- and state-based programs to provide access to service members and their families of all components." This supplemental funding -Beyond Yellow Ribbon (BYR)-supports programs that are intended to provide critical outreach services to personnel returning from deployments. BYR's overall goal is to ease service members' transition back into civilian life. In response to a congressional request to identify programs with strong records of success and to develop a nationwide set of promising practices, the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs asked the RAND Corporation to provide an assessment of 13 programs in the ten states that received fiscal year 2013 BYR funding. The objectives of RAND's study were to: (1) examine the extent to which BYR programs have met their stated goals and the degree to which they have been effective in supporting reserve-component service members and their families, (2) identify promising practices in the programs that could be transferred across the broader set of BYR programs, and (3) suggest ways to improve the effectiveness of those programs as a whole. In RAND's determination, nearly all of the BYR programs are at least partially meeting their goals. This report concludes with recommendations to program leadership and to Department of Defense and congressional policymakers as they consider general program oversight and future BYR funding allocations.